11 - 20 of 387 results for: ENGLISH

In this course, we will consider questions of diaspora, enslavement, race, and identity from the perspective of Asians in South Africa, a country shaped by settler colonialism, enslavement, indentured labor, and apartheid, in ways both related to and different from the United States and other settler colonial states. Enslaved people in South Africa came from multiple places, including South and Southeast Asia, and after slavery's formal abolition in the British empire, the first ship of Indian indentured laborers arrived in 1860, beginning a flow of both free and unfree Asian migrants. We will study recent fiction that represents the experiences of Asians in South Africa, including Andre Brink's Philida (2012), Joanne Joseph's Children of Sugarcane (2021), and late-apartheid stories by South African Indian authors such as Deena Padayachee and Agnes Sam. As we do so, we'll ask: What literary modes are employed to represent these varied migration experiences? How does such literature converge and diverge from the genre conventions of European settler colonists' writing? How do these texts situate newly arrived Asians and their descendants relative to place, history, and belonging in South Africa? To help us think through these questions, we'll engage theoretical frameworks from diaspora studies and settler colonial studies. Brief selections from other South African literature and South African literary criticism will also help us contextualize these works. No previous exposure to South African literature is expected. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

"Utopia," a word coined by Thomas More in his 1516 book of the same name, can be taken to mean "the good place" or "no place." Since the sixteenth century, "Utopia" as a concept retains this double sense. On the one hand, it is the earnest imagination of better society; on the other, it is an ironic attack leveled at the failings of all societies, past, present, and future. In this course we will examine five works of what might be called "utopian satire" in the early modern period, circa 1500-1700: More's Utopia, François Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, Fernao Mendes Pinto's Peregrinaçao, Margaret Cavendish's Blazing World, and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. As we explore the alternative worlds imagined by these authors, we will combine close reading of primary texts with consideration of historical contexts and a selection of influential works of literary criticism from formalist, Marxist, postcolonial, and feminist perspectives. What does each utopia reveal about the dreams and nightmares of a generation? How might utopian satire - the endlessly, and often comically, imperfect search for a perfect world - work as an instrument of social critique and perhaps even social change? (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

What connects Black people in Brazil and Kenya? Germany and Ghana? Australia and South Africa? In this course, we will explore the slippery concept of diaspora and the varied meanings it has taken in the Black/African context. As we travel the world, via texts by Yaa Gyasi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Yvonne Owuor, and Cecile Emeke, from the 19th-century Cape Coast to our current moment, we will examine different layers, trajectories, and forms of dispersal and return. Drawing on literary scholar Cajetan Iheka's framework of "Old" and "New" diasporas ("old" referring to the transatlantic slave trade and "new" referring to postcolonial and neocolonial migrations), we will also situate our readings in relation to major arguments in Black Diaspora Studies and their evolution since the field's inception in the late 1980s and 1990s in the work of such theorists as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall. Throughout the course we will ask: How does one define diaspora? What makes movement diasporic? And who gets to decide? (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

This course explores how 20th and 21st century Anglophone authors resist the rising dominance of English as the language of social, economic and cultural power by inserting multilingualism into English-dominant literature, either through direct translation, codeswitching, language creation, or other forms of linguistic interweaving. Course readings will include multilingual works by writers such as Juan Felipe Herrera, Xu Bing, Samuel Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Ted Chiang, and will feature forms of linguistic expression ranging from indigenous pictographic writing to sci-fi alien languages. We will complement these readings with texts from the fields of translation theory and postcolonial studies, including selections from Gloria Anzaldúa, Walter Benjamin, Amitav Ghosh, and Jacques Derrida. Student will learn how to read and write about this kind of theory, while also developing their skills in archival research through visits to the Library Special Collections. This course will be accessible to students regardless of linguistic background, and no additional foreign language skills are necessary. Instead, as we bring our speculative curiosity to texts containing languages we may not be able speak or read, we will confront - and upend - assumptions about the linguistic Other. We will also reflect on the different ways we use language in everyday life, and consider how we might translate that usage into our own writing. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

In this course, we will delve into the multifaceted role of clothing as both a mask and a mirror, exploring the art of dressing up not only as a form of self-expression but also as a tool for social maneuvering in fiction and non-fiction of the long eighteenth century. How do garments transcend mere fabric to become a language of their own that individuals employ to negotiate status, desire, and agency? What compels someone to use disguise to assume an identity far removed from their own? How do changes to outward appearance spur internal transformations? From wealthy women disguised as sex workers and vice versa, to English Christians using clothing to assimilate with Turkish Muslims, to female husbands pursing wives and masculine careers after donning breeches, to twenty-first century Black women embodying the eighteenth century through dress, we will see how dressing up is at the heart of eighteenth-century interpretations of self and Other. Gaining a grounding in eighteenth-century literature more broadly as we read a variety of genres (including plays, poems, letters, memoirs and periodicals), we will uncover the secrets hidden beneath the seams and discover how dressing up has shaped - and continues to shape - our perceptions of self, relationships, and society. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

In her groundbreaking book Race After Technology (2019), sociologist Ruha Benjamin asserts that we must understand "race as technology." That is, race and racism are tools specifically designed to divide, rank, and discriminate. To see race as technology is to expose how our social infrastructure has been built on anti-Black racism, a reality further reflected in emerging technologies that perpetuate racial biases and injustices, from predictive policing to computer-aided diagnosis systems. In this course, we will investigate the multifaceted relationship between race and technology as we analyze works of African American literature and film - ranging from Harriet Jacobs in the 19th century to Octavia Butler and Ryan Coogler in the 20th and 21st - through an Afrofuturist lens. How do we define "technology" in the context of the African American literary tradition? What are the various roles and functions of technology presented in these texts? Can we understand particular Black storytelling and filmic techniques as technologies themselves designed to decode social systems and structures? To what ends have contemporary Afrofuturist texts reinterpreted and reclaimed technology through a Black and/or African lens? Placing our primary texts in conversation with thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Christina Sharpe, we will explore these questions and more throughout this course.(Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

How did early American writers use representations of Nativeness to convey their own Americanness? How have Native authors written in relation and resistance to this move? And what does the interplay between these modes reveal about the evolution of nation-making across American literary cultures? Staying with this productive tension, this course will proceed in two parts. First, pairing works by early Anglo-American authors like Mary Rowlandson and Lydia Maria Child with readings in Native studies, settler colonial studies, and decolonial theory, we will excavate how canonical texts have naturalized American settlement while also exploring critical approaches that denaturalize those views. From there, we will move to wholly center 20th and 21st century Native voices, from canonized Native writers like Tommy Orange and Leslie Marmon Silko to Native horror satirists Stephen Graham Jones and Morgan Talty, focusing on the various tools and methods through which these authors converse and contend with Native appropriation and erasure. Throughout, this course will provide the theoretical grounding to gain a decolonial perspective on American literary history, to engage with complicated questions of American identity formation, and to critically read and analyze texts, Native narratives in their explicit and implicit forms. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

"Posthuman" often conjures up images of distant futures populated with cyborgs, clones, and various other naturally and artificially intelligent beings. But the posthuman is not the exclusive domain of futuristic speculation. After all, the post- in "posthuman" can be taken to indicate what is after but also beyond the human. In this course, we rediscover a Renaissance world rife with posthuman beings, encounters, and imaginings, animated by active debates about whether to define the human as universal, rational, and self-contained - or not. Drawing on critical posthumanist frameworks supplemented by tools from textual material studies and digital humanities, we will explore works of poetry, drama, and prose that bend and blur boundaries between human, animal, vegetable, mineral, and mechanical. What happens to human readers who listen to the language of cats, or puzzle over the similarity between moss and broken automata, or observe the flames that erupt between "male" and "female" stones? Asking these questions - and much more - we will also consider how the early modern posthuman resonates with our contemporary moment. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)

What makes a monster? Which peoples, bodies, behaviors, and identities are deemed monstrous at particular moments in history? What does the cultural construction of "monstrosity" tell us about a society's anxieties, taboos, and fears? Are monsters, who symbolize deviations from established conventions and norms, inherently queer figures? And how have LGBTQ+ cultural producers re-appropriated the images and tropes of monstrosity as tools and techniques for self-fashioning? In this course, we will explore how same-sex desire and gender transgression have been represented in Anglophone literature, film, and television through various monster figures, from lesbian vampires and ghoulish hauntings to angels, demons, cyborgs, and serial killers. Students will be exposed to a variety of theoretical schools, including queer and trans theory, monster studies, psychoanalysis, film and media studies, and critical disability theory, in order to develop a shared grammar for describing horror, monstrosity, uncanniness, abjection, and even queerness itself. Primary texts will range over 200 years of literary, visual, and media history, and might include selections from Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Flannery O'Connor, Tony Kushner, and others; films and other media might include The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Little Shop of Horrors, and Jennifer's Body. (Note: This Writing-Intensive Seminar in English (WISE) course fulfills WIM for English majors. Non-majors are welcome, space permitting. For enrollment permission contact farrahm@stanford.edu.)